Humor Post #40 from Middle School’s Crankiest Curmudgeon’s Blog (and probably the awesomest YA blog too) –

I can’t be the only person in the world with the following problem, can I? I get out a bag of potato chips or Doritos. A nice new bag all full of fresh snacks for a growing dude like myself. Now comes the hard part. Opening the stupid bag. I take the bag gingerly on either side of the top seal and gently pull my hands apart. Of course you know where that gets me. Nowheres-ville. So I pull a bit harder. Still nothing. My need for an immediate snack makes my frustration grow. And you probably know what comes next. I give the bag a quick, violent snap outward. If I’m lucky I get my chips. If the usual thing happens, I get my chips all right, but they’re scattered all over the floor, having exploded from the bag. Then it’s a race between me and my dog to see who can get the most dusty chips off the floor. I usually win, but that’s because I’m good at blocking him out.

I’ve already written about this before. And I did it in verse. But the crisis continues and I wish I could find a solution.

So I went to YouTube where so many solutions to so many earth-shattering problems are found and I was able to find the this British guy who seemed to have a great method for opening that evil bag of chips. Ooh, he’s a master. Check it out here. There’s only one catch. I tried his method and I mucked it all up again. Chips all over the place. And my mom’s not that keen on having me experiment with new bags all the time. It did make for a great explosion sound though. Maybe this guy will come out with an instructional DVD.

It’s not just me who has this kind of problem with packaging. It’s sad to see Daniel opening his bags of rice cakes — he’s on a diet, the poor sap — and getting all ticked off when his attempts lead to the top rice cake always getting crumbled into rice pebbles. Rice cakes don’t exactly hold together too well and he ends up trashing at least one, usually two, rice cakes per package. (BTW, that’s a pretty mean thing for the company to do, calling them rice cakes. Uh, they’re about as far from cake as you can get unless you’re thinking of mud that gets caked on your shoes if you slosh around near a creek. That’s just cruel. Here you go, Daniel. A couple of nice cakes. Yeah, tasteless styrofoam peanuts is more like it.)

Anyway, time for ADD boy to get back on topic. It’s not just bags of chips that are hard to open. Cereal bags (inside the boxes) can be killers too. Sometimes they open right but usually I put a big tear down the side of the bag and a bunch of the cereal pours out into the box. Then the bag can’t really be closed and the cereal gets stale faster. Which is good for the cereal company, I guess, but not for ol’ Crankenfuss.

Now let me make something clear here. (“At last,” you’re probably saying.) I realize this isn’t as important as the end of the world that some people claim is going to happen soon. Yeah, if and when that happens, I probably won’t be jumping around whining about bags of chips. But little things add up, you know? Annoyances like this could be holding me back in my rap writing career. And that would be truly tragic, wouldn’t it?

So unless I want to give us snacks forever, I’ll keep working at finding a cure for this bag disease. Maybe I’ll end up with a Nobel Peace Prize for something for bringing inner peace to all those millions of people who suffer like I do.

So if you have any cool tricks you can teach me, let me know. In the meantime, so long from
The Dude with the ‘Tude,
Dr. Crankenfuss